Day 1
7/6/2023
Dearest CCICTV,
Hola from Ecuador! After a lovely 7-hour 1AM-8AM flight from SFO to Panama City and another 2 hour flight from Panama to Guayaquil, we have finally arrived at our accommodations :)
Lots of sporadic sleeping on various planes and chairs. Auntie Louise also got us into a club thing in the Panama City airport while we were waiting for the flight to Ecuador, very cool. Elaine and I mostly did college orientation things and we also ended up playing an endless game of 2-person Bluff!
Pre-flight prayer
A quick food review:
breakfast on the plane: Elaine - 4.5/10, April - 3/10
the egg sandwich was objectively better than the banana oatmeal blocks.
lunch (?) in the Panama airport's Copa club: Elaine - 5/10, April - 5.5/10
hummus was good, sandwiches were not quite sandwiches
dinner (lowkey slapped): Elaine - 8.5/10, April - 8/10
fried rice, chow mein, and inca cola very epic very kewl
The weather in Guayaquil is very China, very humid. The local missionary and his wife picked us up and one of the restaurant-owning locals graciously sent some scrumptious dinner to our Airbnb. After a very filling dinner, we discussed our plans for tomorrow, the political situation in Ecuador, safety concerns, and some insight from the missionary. It's apparently fairly hot right now for what is supposed to be their winter (every day is 70-90 degrees), so we expect to be about three shades tanner by the time we get back.
To summarize what the missionary shared about what's going on in Ecuador:
political unrest, president dissolved Congress, an election happening in August
things apparently got pretty bad in the month of April, like 30 murders a day
drugs
many people have been trying (keyword: trying) to go to America due to the instability here
Tomorrow we'll be going to the open market and doing some home visitations. Will keep ustedes updated.
Thank God for a smooth first day overall, we're excited for the week ahead! Elaine and I will be updating the prayer requests page daily if anyone would like to pray for us.
That's all for today, good night, God bless ~
April
green bois
